Tag Archives: Cortex in Metallic Pastels

Thanks to a RT from @coreyspowell I stumbled across a Feb. 7, 2014 article in Science (magazine) describing the 2013 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners. I am highlighting a few of the entries here but there are more images in the article and a slideshow.

With a Ph.D. in neuroscience and a love of Asian art, it may have been inevitable that Greg Dunn would combine them to create sparse, striking illustrations of the brain. “It was a perfect synthesis of my interests,” Dunn says.

Cortex in Metallic Pastels represents a stylized section of the cerebral cortex, in which axons, dendrites, and other features create a scene reminiscent of a copse of silver birch at twilight. An accurate depiction of a slice of cerebral cortex would be a confusing mess, Dunn says, so he thins out the forest of cells, revealing the delicate branching structure of each neuron.

Dunn blows pigments across the canvas to create the neurons and highlights some of them in gold leaf and palladium, a technique he is keen to develop further.

“My eventual goal is to start an art-science lab,” he says. It would bring students of art and science together to develop new artistic techniques. He is already using lithography to give each neuron in his paintings a different angle of reflectance. “As you walk around, different neurons appear and disappear, so you can pack it with information,” he says.

“Most people don’t expect a whole ecosystem right on the leaf surface,” says Eve Syrkin Wurtele, a plant biologist at Iowa State University. Meta!Blast: The Leaf, the game that Wurtele and her team created, lets high school students pilot a miniature bioship across this strange landscape, which features nematodes and a lumbering tardigrade. They can dive into individual cells and zoom around a chloroplast, activating photosynthesis with their ship’s search lamp. Pilots can also scan each organelle they encounter to bring up more information about it from the ship’s BioLog—a neat way to put plant biology at the heart of an interactive gaming environment.

This is a second recognition for Meta!Blast, which won an Honorable Mention in the 2011 visualization challenge for a version limited to the inside of a plant cell.

The last remaining plant cell in existence is dying. An expert team of plant scientists have inexplicably disappeared. Can you rescue the lost team, discover what is killing the plant, and save the world?

Meta!Blast is a real-time 3D action-adventure game that puts you in the pilot’s seat. Shrink down to microscopic size and explore the vivid, dynamic world of a soybean plant cell spinning out of control. Interact with numerous characters, fight off plant pathogens, and discover how important plants are to the survival of the human race.